What to do with treated water

Irrigation near Chinchilla. Courtesy of Karen Auty.

‘We call the gas companies liars, cheats and thieves,’ said Joe Hill. ‘They lie to get on your place, they cheat you out of money they should be paying you and they thieve the water.’

Gas companies have to extract water from coal seams to get the gas out and keep it flowing. The water they suck out of an aquifer on one property, could be somebody else’s irrigation allocation on the other side of the river.

The extracted water is piped to reverse osmosis (RO) plants, which take out salt and heavy metals, such as lead and uranium. This process produces what the mining companies and government call ‘beneficial water’ and most other people call ‘RO water’. It is piped to farmers for irrigation.

‘Irrigation with RO water has not been tried long enough on this country to know whether it’s going to be a success or not,’ said Joe Hill. ‘It might be alright on very sandy soil but not on this heavy Brigalow clay country. This water is allowed to be up to 950 parts per million of salt but I think 500 is the maximum for irrigation water. The RO water could be closer to 950 rather than 500. You’d never be sure.’

‘The gas companies have never known what they are going to do with the remaining sludge after the water has been through an RO plant,’ said Jo. ‘A few years ago they were talking about carting 3,000 truckloads of this waste to Swanbank, the contaminated waste dump at Ipswich. But they had never talked to Swanbank or the Ipswich Council. The latest I heard was that at Woleebee Creek at Wandoan, they have built huge lined tanks where they will build a pyramid of waste and cover it.’

Evaporation ponds, which were banned, are now called transfer dams but they are just as big and are virtually the same thing. ‘Evaporation ponds were built without spillways but the transfer dams have them,’ said Joe. ‘Lined transfer dams, covering enormous areas, are situated where most people can’t see them. A neighbour, who had seen a spillway in one, asked me to question the EHP about it at a meeting. They said they would have to get back to me. A water management employee from a mining company talked to me during the lunch break. He told me that the government allowed them to put in spillways in case of big rain events. If a dam is nearly full then it won’t blow out, the water will just go over the spillway. I said that’s contaminated water and you are not allowed to release it. He said when it rains, only the stormwater runs off the top.'

For more information see my first blog, Learning about CSG.